Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), at a hearing of Senate Intelligence Committee at the US Capitol in Washington, DC on March 18, 2026. Michael Brochstein/ZUMA / Splash Anonymously sourced hit pieces have hammered Tulsi Gabbard the past few months in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New Republic, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, you name it.
They are part of a relentless campaign to undermine President Trump’s director of national intelligence because she is almost single-handedly revealing the dirty secrets of the Deep State.
Rumors swirl around Washington that the president is displeased with her and she will soon follow Pam Bondi out the door.
The commander in chief is unwavering in his support for her when reporters ask, including during an impromptu press conference on Air Force One last week.
“Sure,” he said when asked if he still has “confidence” in Gabbard after the incendiary resignation of one of her top aides, Joe Kent, over his opposition to the Iran war.
“She’s a little bit different in her thought process than me, but that doesn’t make somebody not available to serve,” said Trump.
He was even more effusive last summer on my podcast Pod Force One, after Gabbard held a bombshell press conference announcing she had sent criminal referrals to the DOJ and FBI implicating former President Barack Obama in the “seditious conspiracy” of the Russia-collusion hoax.
“You know there were some people that really wanted Tulsi — they thought she was going to do a fantastic job . . . She’s tough and she’s smart and she went . . . deep into the files and she found it . . . Look, this was an attempted coup . . . A lot of people would not have found [the classified documents showing Obama’s role].
“They wouldn’t have found it to be politically correct to find it, OK? It would be easier not to.”
More than anyone else in the administration, Gabbard is carrying out the president’s express wishes to declassify information in order to bring wrongdoers to account and shine a light on the various Deep State plots against him — from Russiagate to Ukraine impeachment and perhaps even the multiple assassination attempts.
Yet she is repeatedly obstructed and sabotaged in her efforts to declassify material, not just by the Democrats and their Deep State allies who are terrified of her, but by the very agencies that carried out the anti-Trump plots, weaponized intelligence under Democrat presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and hid the evidence.
Trump’s own appointees, Kash Patel at the FBI and John Ratcliffe at the CIA, appear to be engaged in turf wars or at least have allowed their bureaucrats to stymie her work.
You don’t need inside information to know that. The tensions are there for all to see.
The disharmony sometimes has gone public, such as when the FBI sent a sharply worded letter to Congress last October, expressing “strong objection” to a proposal that would have streamlined counterintelligence coordination across the government by making Gabbard’s ODNI the lead agency.
There was friction, too, about Gabbard’s intervention in the FBI’s slow investigation into election irregularities in Fulton County, Ga., which Trump himself asked her to oversee.
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The CIA tried to resist Gabbard when she declassified a 2020 report from the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and anonymous officials used the old “sources and methods” line to complain to the media.
When Gabbard quite rightly advised Trump to strip security clearances from 37 current and former intelligence officials who had engaged in “politicization or weaponization of intelligence,” she was accused by unnamed CIA officials of endangering an “undercover” officer by disclosing her name.
But that former CIA official, Julia Gurganus — who oversaw the politicized, Obama-ordered intelligence-community assessment that was central to the Russia hoax — was a public figure who cited her own CIA credentials in appearances at conferences and think-tank events, and whose photo was on her public biography on The Atlantic website.
Sources say Gurganus was hastily designated “undercover” a couple of months before her security clearance was revoked as a ploy to protect her from Trump’s wrath.
Inexplicably, Gabbard also had to fight with the CIA bureaucracy to release information that showed the agency in a bad light under Biden, including its failure to vet 18,000 known or suspected terrorists who were allowed to enter the US in the frenzy after Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
Behind the scenes, tensions are worse, with White House officials reportedly called in to adjudicate at times.
No doubt the leaks to the media come from disgruntled institutionalists who don’t want Trump to discover what they’ve been up to.
But it is hard enough to bring sneaky people to account without the agencies that hold the evidence squabbling with each other.
Despite the sabotage, Gabbard plows on, with several more bombshell ODNI declassification releases expected soon:
2019 transcripts from closed congressional hearings with former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, whose whistleblower referral triggered the first impeachment of Trump.
It is expected to show that the impeachment was based on the flimsiest pretext, highly spun second- and third-hand accounts of a telephone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump asked the Ukrainian leader to help with the investigation into Hunter Biden’s lucrative influence peddling in his country when his father was VP.
COVID files, including a surprising number of US-funded bio labs in Ukraine, China and elsewhere.
Kent’s resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center and subsequent anti-war media tour have added to pressure on Gabbard by those in the administration who suspect her of harboring the same antiwar, Israel-conspiracy views.
But by fair accounts, Gabbard, a military veteran and former Democrat presidential candidate who with RFK Jr. formed part of Trump’s broad-tent philosophy that won the 2024 election, has behaved professionally and dispassionately and does not share Kent’s apocalyptic views.
When she briefs the president on Iran intelligence from the 18 intelligence agencies she oversees, for instance, she delivers the unvarnished facts, as the president deserves.
The intelligence from other agencies does not conflict with the CIA’s, but each agency’s analysis is slightly nuanced, providing a more complete picture for decision-makers.
Surely that’s why we have so many intelligence agencies, and the ODNI to oversee them, so as to avoid the tunnel vision, manufactured intelligence, and mixed signals that led to 9/11 and the ill-fated Iraq war.
The attacks on Gabbard are dismaying for the 54% of American voters, according to a Rasmussen poll last year, who believe Gabbard’s claim that Obama administration officials “committed serious crimes by manipulating intelligence” to falsely claim Russia interfered with the 2016 election to get Trump elected.
It’s even more dismaying for the 69% who demand accountability for those crimes.
With only months left before Democrats may take back the House and start impeaching Trump again, accountability is nowhere to be seen for the likes of Russia hoaxers John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey, let alone the nameless Deep Staters still burrowed in the agencies.
